The United Nations and the Iraqi government have reached a deal to transfer more than 3,000 Iranian dissidents living in a camp north of Baghdad, potentially averting what international observers have warned would be a massacre.

The U.S. military on Thursday acknowledged serious mistakes in a cross-border operation last month that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and strained ties with the South Asian nation, but said U.S. forces had acted in self-defense.

Syrian security forces this week killed more than 200 people on the eve of a visit by international observers monitoring Syria’s compliance with an Arab League peace plan, according to eyewitnesses, activists and opposition sources.

There is no sure path for the transition of power in nuclear-armed North Korea, even as its citizens mourn the death of longtime dictator Kim Jong-il and praise the rise of his hand-picked successor, Kim Jong-un, regional analysts say.

South Sudan’s president said Friday that his country is not arming rebels in two of Sudan’s border states, from where more than 50,000 refugees have fled fighting in recent months, according to U.N. estimates.

Survivors of a 1996 terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen are offended that an Iraqi official with ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was welcomed to the White House this week.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday urged the leaders of oil-rich South Sudan to manage natural resources prudently and warned them against falling prey to unscrupulous corporations and countries.

A former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the FBI says played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen, accompanied Iraq’s prime minister to the White House on Monday, attending an event at which President Obama trumpeted the end of the Iraq War.

A senior U.S. official Wednesday warned Iraq against using violence to evict unarmed Iranian dissidents from a camp north of Baghdad by the end of the month, as a top member of Congress accused the State Department of moving at a snail’s pace to prevent what he called a possible massacre of the residents of Camp Ashraf.

The Iraqi government is using the State Department’s terrorist designation of a group of Iranian dissidents as an excuse to crack down on the unarmed exiles in their camp north of Baghdad, a top Republican lawmaker said Tuesday.